The present invention relates to a card comprising a licker-in, a main cylinder and a doffer as well as a main carding zone defined by a revolving flat arrangement, whereby, viewed in the circumferential direction of the main cylinder, there is a pre-carding zone between the licker-in and the main carding zone, a recarding zone between the main carding zone and the doffer and an intermediate carding zone between the doffer and the licker-in.
With the use of cards, different card equipment is fitted in the pre-carding zones and, occasionally, also in the recarding zones and the intermediate carding zones, whereby the type and sequence of the card units is selected to correspond to the characteristics of the fibres to be processed. For example, usually the staple length, type and degree of soiling of the fibres to be processed is taken into account.
The card equipment itself can be card rods, for example, which are fitted with needle or saw tooth clothing, or guide rods, knife rods, main cylinder cover plates or cleaning devices.
Although it does not often occur that the equipment of a card is changed, for example, in order to suit other fibre characteristics or because wear must be taken into account, nevertheless, such an alteration of the card equipment is expensive and takes time, above all from the point of view of setting the card equipment, so that the preset clearance to the needle clothing of the main cylinder is maintained. Also, the desired equipment of the card cannot always be realized, because of the limited space available in the pre-carding zone.